


Crisis: Collide

by pinstripedJackalope



Series: Keith's Binder [7]
Category: Voltron: Legendary Defender
Genre: Aged-Up Character(s), Alien Biology, Alien Flora & Fauna, Alien Planet, Alien Technology, Alien has stopped feeling like a word too, Aliens, Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Amputation, Blood and Gore, Blood and Injury, Broken Bones, Concussions, Crash Landing, Dubious Science, Eye Trauma, Female Pronouns for Pidge | Katie Holt, Galra Keith (Voltron), Gen, Head Injury, Healing, Hurt Keith (Voltron), Hurt Shiro (Voltron), Hurt/Comfort, Injury, Injury Recovery, Injury has stopped feeling like a word, Keith (Voltron) Angst, Keith (Voltron) Whump, Keith (Voltron) is a Mess, Magic, Major Character Injury, Medical Inaccuracies, Medical Procedures, Medical Trauma, Medical has stopped feeling like a word too, Near Death, Near Death Experiences, Not Canon Compliant, Older Characters, Other Additional Tags to Be Added, POV Pidge | Katie Holt, Permanent Injury, Platonic Cuddling, Prosthesis, Science Fiction, Sentient Voltron Lions, Shiro (Voltron) Whump, The Olkari, Trans Character, Trans Keith (Voltron), Trans Male Keith (Voltron), Whump, Xenobiology, everyone gets hurt but shiro and keith are hurt the worst, how many tags can a tagger tag, like a lot of hurt, olkarion survived in this verse, what can i say
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2019-07-12
Updated: 2019-09-19
Packaged: 2020-06-26 17:15:12
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings, Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 7
Words: 18,018
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19772803
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/pinstripedJackalope/pseuds/pinstripedJackalope
Summary: In a distant future, Pidge Holt is twenty-four years old and still Paladin of the Green Lion.  She has fought wars, lost and found a family or two, created life (plants... she means plants), and just wants to enjoy her ten-minute break between drills.  Unfortunately for her, the universe has other plans.Or: a whump fic in which the Voltron team is in crisis after the castleship crashes into a planet, as experienced by a very frustrated Pidge.





	1. Prologue

**Author's Note:**

> If I don't start posting this I never will. I have four chapters finished after the prologue and I need motivation to finish the rest of it. I'll post one chapter a day until I have no more finished chapters to post--after that, updates are uncertain. Apologies in advance.

_T-minus 3 dobashes._

“Hmmm hm hmm hmmmmmm… livin’ on a praaa-aaa—oh, fuck you!”

_T-minus 2 dobashes._

“Incorect syntax my ass. Stop giving me error messages! I was waiting all day to work on you, so if you don’t compile this time I will literally throw you out an airlock.”

_T-minus 1 dobash._

“Thank you. Now was that so—Lance?”

…

“Come on, dude, not funny. We literally just got back from drills and we only have like ten minutes of downtime.”

…

“…uh, Lance? Anyone?”

…

“I could have sworn I heard a—”

_T-minus 0 dobashes._

“What the—”

…

…

…

_Impact._


	2. Aural

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Pidge wakes up.

Consciousness drags a rough hand up Pidge’s spine. She floats in nothingness for just a moment, not comfortable but not in pain, before she feels the hand press an ON switch somewhere in her brain and all at once her body is connected to her mind again. She can feel _everything_. Lying on her front, cheek squished flat, hair in disarray, she spares her aching face a moment to regret every single thing she’s ever done. 

_Damn_ that clash with the Altean Language Learning Software. Her neck hasn’t been right since.

There’s yelling somewhere down the hall. Odd and echoey. She doesn’t focus on it, too busy trying to keep her rage crammed down inside her sore rib cage. _Maybe,_ just _maybe,_ if she slept on a more regular _schedule,_ she wouldn’t have surges of _IRRATIONAL ANGER_ whenever the boys got a little too loud outside her door while she was trying to sleep. _Unfortunately_ , however, logic is still offline. She rolls her closed eyes, scrunching them up until her face wrinkles. She just wants to sleep, why can’t they keep quiet for a few hours?

What time is it, anyway? 

She doesn’t know. An obscure part of her psyche is distinctly on edge for some reason she can’t place. Did she fall asleep somewhere weird again? One of the vents? That would explain the soft echo… and the itching of her nose.

She brings one hand up to her face and fumbles. Her fingers can’t get a grip on her nose to ease the sensation of impending sneeze, slipping in dust so fine that it feels almost like water on her skin. All at once the world shifts a little more into focus, the hand cranking a knob one notch to the right.

Something is wrong.

Her eyes snap open at the realization. In front of her she sees debris and fractured pieces of something big, all illuminated by the emergency lights of her armor. The yelling is actually screaming—one voice, echoing back and forth across the air. One person who is literally doing nothing but screaming. Breath, scream, breath, scream, unhalting. 

Pidge’s stomach drops. “Oh, fu—” she starts to say, and chokes on a puff of dust that rises in her face. She scrambles into a sitting position, trying to remember what happened. There’s nothing but the headache pounding behind her eyes. Where is everybody? Her shoulder cries and her ribs ache as she jerks her head back and forth, taking in all of the debris scattered around her. 

It’s gray. Shiny, almost metallic gray. With a frown, she looks closer. She’s perched on a large, flat slab of it that must have come down from the ceiling, which in turn is half buried amid smaller pieces of the same material. She can’t see far enough to get a real grasp of how far the damage goes, so she focuses on what’s within her reach, fingers dragging across all the pieces, large and small. Snatching a chunk of the mystery mineral with her good arm, she brings it close to her face to examine it, blinking through the fog of bad eyesight and too-dim-lighting. 

One side of the chunk is flat and smooth, polished to a matte shine. Familiar. The jagged sides are like volcanic rock, spongy-looking, filled with teeny air bubbles. Less familiar. 

A far distant memory surfaces—Coran pinching his mustache with glee as he explains how the castle walls were made by his Grandfather. Genius, he’d said. The outside hull of the ship was constructed using the strongest material known to Altea, at least before the comet hit, but as it was much too rare to use for the rest of the ship they chose to substitute this specific volcanic rock for the walls and coat it in thin, self-healing sheets of metal.

Now that she’s finally seeing the raw materials, she’s vaguely impressed. Coran has a way of dulling down his history lectures until they feel like fuzz in her eardrums, but seeing it with her own eyes… it’s unlike anything she’s ever known. So light. Elegant. She picks up more. It’s like holding foam. Except the pieces that are clogged with blood, anyway, which are weighted in her hands.

“Wait,” she said aloud, voice swallowed by the echoes all around her. Blood. Injury. Triage suddenly springs to the top of the to-do list. 

Pidge twists abruptly, the rocks sliding out of her hands. Her shoulder lets out a marked protest at the movement. Feeling along carefully, she investigates the pain and finds that a piece of the castle is lodged in the gap in her armor, right in the place that her right shoulder pad— _pauldrons, they_ _’re pauldrons_ , her mind supplies—usually protects. She pulls it out without thinking, hisses as the rock scrapes the muscle of her shoulder. She presses her hand against the bleeding, where her pauldron _should be_. The pauldron in question has been torn off, leaving behind the strap that would usually secure it to her breastplate. 

She takes a deep breath through the pain and tries to think back to where she lost it. She can’t. In fact, now that her mind is starting to kick into gear, she realizes that she’s squinting around because her helmet is missing, as well. No helmet, no glasses, no eyesight. Head trauma? The palm not currently holding her shoulder together ghosts over her crown, discovering tacky blood. A pulse pounds across her skull, thick and unsteady. It seems to pump in a vague echo of the screams.

And with that, everything finally, finally falls all the way into place. 

Something terrible has happened. The castle is in ruins. Her helmet is missing, her armor is damaged, and she doesn’t know if anyone is alive except her and whoever is in the distance, whoever is _screaming_.

Those screams… she doesn’t recognize the voice. Her mind immediately kicks into gear trying to identify it. It’s hoarse, echoing, and distant, but it’s clear enough that she is reasonably sure it’s not one of the Alteans, and likely not Hunk. It could be either of the other garrison cadets, or Shiro. That only narrows things down slightly, but because it’s so loud it stands to reason that it can be heard throughout whatever pocket of space she’s occupying. If hallways are still intact, then she can assume that The Screamer is closer than if his voice is echoing across empty space. It’ll be harder to find the source if the halls are intact, but… the alternative makes fear buzz across her fingers. She hopes there’s still internal structures that haven’t collapsed completely. The memory of life before her impromptu nap is hazy— _was she_ _… working on a project?_ —and she doesn’t have enough information to put together what kind of damage she’s dealing with, but she knows that the more debris, the worse the initial damage was… and the less chance there is that her fellow teammates are unharmed. Which, she finds, is a _terrifying_ prospect.

“Guys?” she calls, tense and ready to protect her head if she hears shifting in the darkness caused by the sound vibrations. No response, just more screams.

She bites her lip, curls her hands around her lips, and calls again. “GUYS?”

Nothing.

The Green Lion! _The Green Lion will be able to help_! 

Centering herself quickly, Pidge reaches out a confident mental hand to her lion. Her connection is wobbly, but now that she’s looking for it she can feel a sense of urgency radiating from Green. She realizes with chagrin that Green has been trying to get her moving for a while now. _I_ _’m here_ , she says, and Green is thankful for about two seconds before it’s overshadowed by the thick, oozing sense of URGENCY. 

Air wheezes through her teeth, and she grits them. What does she know? She knows one person is alive. 

_—URGENCY—_

He doesn’t sound good, but he’s alive. He needs help. 

_—URGENCY—_

Structural collapse is a dangerous thing—any moment the debris can shift, come down on top of her, and she won’t be able to do a thing about it. She needs to get somewhere stable—

_—URGENCY—_

—and take care of herself so that she can start moving safely—

_—URGENCY—_

—and hopefully, by the time she gets to him, she will still be able to do something, _anything_ , to ease whatever awful situation is causing him to _sound like that_. 

Forced into tangible action by Green’s urging, Pidge has a proper to-do list up and running in seconds, her brain auto-sorting tasks by _closest_ and _most vital_. She squints at her broken armor in the darkness, trying to reassure Green that she’s on her way. Green doesn’t seem hurt, but she’s throwing out images of _glue-vice-vines_. Stuck. She’s stuck somewhere. She won’t be able to help. There’s no one else, Pidge will have to work alone.

She can do that.

The first order of business is to take care of the gaps in her armor in case the outside hull of the castle has been breached, then find her team, THEN see if she can free one or more of the Lions, wherever they are. She can’t hear the telltale whistle of vacuum claiming the castleship atmosphere, but she’s not ready to bet on what her pitiful human ears can hear. Especially with the noise that’s already ringing in her head. 

For one wild moment, Pidge wonders if the screams are ever going to stop. She waits, like they will hear her thoughts and fall away…

They don’t. She shakes herself. Looking around with more focus, she finds her helmet quickly enough. It only slid a few feet past her on the ceiling slab. She lets go of her shoulder, checking that the blood flow isn’t too strong, before she wriggles over to it. Thank god for self-healing technology, honestly. The green helm has a crack in the side but it’s slowly closing before her eyes. She estimates that it’ll be airtight again in a minute or two, and quickly crams it on her head. Then she pries off the rest of her arm plating and double-checks the wound there, looking for a way to fill the gaps.

The wound is deep, but the good news is that the hole in her under armor is smaller than she had dared to hope. There’s not too much blood—just a small smear across the ‘floor’ where she was lying. It’s clotting decently already, implying that she was out for a while. She finds a sealant in a hidden compartment in the plating on her right thigh, and carefully pinches her suit closed. The suit will help promote the clotting, at least, and assuming that there aren’t any other weak points, she should be properly air-tight now. She shimmies back into the rest of her armor. Or, she corrects, the armor that she can find. She’s still missing a shoulder pad, but she figures she’ll just have to make due.

The connection with Green is stable, but that urgency still rings. It’s time to get going. She’s Pidge Holt, twenty-four years old, a Paladin of Voltron, and she is _ready_.

What she’s been assuming is a secure footing, it seems, is _not_. The moment she tries to stand, her nose finally decides to visit her with a sneeze that rocks her forward, causing a gut-clenching shift under her feet. Suddenly the previously stable slab tips, unbalanced by her weight. There’s the sound of rock grinding against rock and she’s thrown off into what she can only assume is empty space. Her jetpack sparks once and goes out, leaving her vulnerable. The darkness around her is so deeply black, so thick, that the indicator lights on her armor can’t puncture it—not until pieces of debris materialize out of the gloom to strike her arms, her chest, her limp knees. She tucks and tries to roll, the momentum causing her whole body to tremble at every strike. Terror makes her muscles clench, and she tries to loosen them because she KNOWS that the more she tenses the worse this fall will be and she has no idea if there will be anything but more debris to stop her little ragdoll body because a ship this large would be reduced to A LOT OF DEBRIS, the entire inside of the ship could be a rockslide into the depths of nothingness and suddenly she doesn’t know if she’ll even stop at all and oh, god, she can’t even stop the way her brain keeps _thinking_ —

And then, almost immediately, she tumbles right into solid structure. It’s unsettling, really, to have just enough time to imagine an eternity falling through nothingness before the breath is knocked out of her and she comes to a halt. Her head spins, but a moment later she hears something above her shift again, and she has just enough time to throw herself to the side before the slab comes down on top of her. She lays there, taking stock as the vibrations slowly shiver into nothingness.

So, that happened. She blows out hard through a pout. She’s going to have to be a lot more careful if she doesn’t want more impromptu cliff-diving fun, and she is NOT happy about it.

The good news (good?) is that the screams are still very much within earshot. It doesn’t sound as if she’s moved at all, in fact. That is less good, because it implies that she’s farther away than she thought, but as she clutches her shoulder and tries standing up again, twisting to see if she can get a look at her jetpack, she realizes that from this angle she can see some of the castle’s emergency lights. She holds onto the first thing that looks sturdy enough, taking in everything she can. Apparently, she’d forgotten that the direction ‘down’ existed when she was looking for signs of life—the wall she’s pressed against is more intact than anything she’s found so far, and it’s lit pretty consistently with strips of glowing red. She still can’t see very far in any direction, but this gives her a lot more to work with. 

Things here are still in their proper places—lights inset in the wall, the metal sheet still intact—though they’re canted to the side. There must be more structural reinforcement here. Or maybe she’s even on her way toward a mostly undamaged part of the castle. She does a few quick calculations, using what she knows of the schematics of the ship. If most of the rubble came from certain rooms and walls that weren’t important enough to reinforce, things like storage and the common areas, then this should lead her toward central command. Her heart squeezes painfully in her chest as she tries not to think about what would happen to anyone who was caught in the common areas. Better to just… move closer to the helm. 

There’s a panel loose in her jetpack. She shimmies it back into place with a satisfying snap before she calls out again, just in case the shift in position has made a difference. “Hey! Can anyone hear me?”

There’s no answer. So, no one in earshot. Unless they’re unresponsive. Or they can’t hear her over the screaming? 

She flicks on her comms, to test the theory. This, it turns out, is a mistake even worse than standing up. Her helmet crackles to life, and in response the intercom system of the castle tries to boost her signal, as usual. Keyword: tries. The resulting static is an assault on every fiber of her being, making the hairs on her neck stand straight up. The feedback grows as the intercom malfunctions, projecting the static from her helmet through the desecrated hall she’s standing in, which her helmet then picks up again and amplifies.

“HOLY HELL,” she screams over the noise, slamming the off button. She cradles her head in her hands as the assault dies, leaving her eardrums vibrating.

Uncurling slowly, she tries to listen. It wasn’t the intended effect, but maybe the noise got someone’s attention…?

She hears… nothing.

Disappointment sours in her stomach. How is she supposed to get in touch with her team when nothing is _working_? But… wait a second. She hears NOTHING. The implications crash over her head, the dawning realization that she was missing something obvious. Where are the screams? _Why isn_ _’t he screaming anymore?_

Oh god, at least when he was screaming she knew he had enough energy to, well, scream. The silence could mean so many bad, bad things. Succumbing to shock, blood loss, further trauma… he could have finally lost consciousness, or been buried alive as the sound vibrations loosened a chunk of debris. He could be drowning in water from burst pipes. He could be aspirating his own blood. He could—

The scenarios course through her, one after another, the face and body of the victim morphing from Lance to Keith to Shiro. She tries to gauge how likely each scene is, like Slav would do: then to only hold onto the ones that are most probable. She fails. She has no point of reference. She still has no direction to go. She’s so _scared_.

Hyperventilation is creeping up on her, and only the bond of her Lion is keeping it at bay. The sense of urgency blooms in her chest and she wants to cry, but instead she takes a deep breath, holds it, and _listens_. Because Green NEEDS her right now, they all do, and even if she’s too far away to figure out what’s wrong with Green she knows that she can do this. She WILL do this.

Her ears catch the last echoes of static, badly warped by the space around her. Dripping water and settling debris. Creaks and groans, things sinking against each other. Faint alarms, so far off that they feel like a dream. Her own heartbeat, thudding and thudding and thudding.

…and another voice. A different one.

“Keith?” it calls.


	3. Distal

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Pidge finds Lance.

Taking precautions, Pidge scrambles up onto the wall, bracing herself on one jagged edge. “No! It’s me, Pidge!” she calls out, determined to pinpoint where the voice is coming from. Her own voice seems so small where it faintly echoes around. “Where are you?”

She gets a snort in response. “Stuck in a damn hole!” comes the new voice again, sounding more melodramatic than anything, and the wheezy grip of panic finally starts to loosen. “That’s not what I meant, though—he stopped.”

“Lance, that’s you, right?” Pidge says into the darkness, squinting as if that’ll help penetrate it. She can barely see a few feet around her. “You heard Keith? Where is he?”

“Yeah, it’s me.” He manages to sound annoyed at the question, as if she should OBVIOUSLY know who she’s talking to. Pidge rolls her eyes. “You heard the screaming, right? That was DEFINITELY Keith, I’d recognize that voice anywhere.”

That gives Pidge pause for thought. “You can recognize him even when he’s lost in cavernous ruins and screamed himself hoarse?”

“Well… yeah?”

…She will never understand this guy. First at the Garrison, identifying Keith by his hair, and now this. It would be impressive if it weren’t so damn confusing. She shakes her head at the darkness. “I’m coming to you, help me navigate.”

“No problem. Just follow the sultry sound of my voice. What do you think the chances are that this is a very vivid simulation? Because if you ask me—”

Tuning out the words, Pidge uses Lance’s voice as a guide and is able to pick her way around the wall and across a fairly wide gap devoid of debris. It’s all behind and to the left of her, what feels like several rooms worth of walls just pushed aside, leaving ankle-high ruins in their wake. The meat of the darkness is finally taking a shape—she looks ahead and can almost see the blackness softening into edges. Lance’s voice leads her up a small hill made of layers of floor, stacked like playing cards. She pauses at the top, looking as far as she can. Where there used to be several floors of recreational rooms, the pool and the like, there is now just a huge cavernous space. Dust settles all the way from here to the edges of her vision, where the emergency lights catch on the motes. She hears things moving, small rolling _clacks_ that signify things falling into their new places. 

Suddenly she realizes that either the gravity is still on… or they crashed onto some celestial body that has its own gravity. The information is stored away for later. More important is the sound up here—echoey like marbles rattling around in a jar, but she can hear so much more. The air seems less stuffy and dead than it did in whatever little air socket she first woke up in, things that used to be ventilation shafts releasing wind that cuts across the remnants of walls. And alongside it she can hear…

“Lance, can you hear that?”

“No?” he says, pausing his lowdown of why or why not aliens would agree to the Geneva convention. He’s a lot closer now, but she still doesn’t have a visual. His voice seems to be amplified by whatever nook he’s crammed in. “I’m in a hole, I can barely hear you,” he snarks.

She sighs. “Then hush a second.” 

It’s… another voice. Not her, not Lance, not Keith screaming. It’s deeper, a little calmer, murmuring things that don’t quite sound like words.

“Shiro?” Pidge calls into the eerie almost darkness. It doesn’t sound quite right… she reconsiders. “…Coran?”

“Number five?” the voice comes back, slightly louder.

“Coran!” she calls, ecstatic. Now she’s getting somewhere! “Where are you?”

“Close to the sustenance wing, I’d dare say.” He hums, and the air carries it pleasantly. Pidge spares a moment to be grateful for how strong his voice is up here. “Or what used to be the sustenance wing. It’s been, ah… relocated. It’s now closer to the hangars.”

“Story of my life,” Lance says, just loud enough to get a chuckle out of Coran.

“Coran, can you move?” Pidge calls.

“No such luck, number five. The bad news is that I’m pinned. The good news is that I can see the red paladin! …And the bad news again is that he is also pinned. He’s badly injured, but I can’t get enough leverage to see how badly. He lost consciousness a few dobashes back—I’ve been trying to keep him calm, but I think my voice was only making it worse.”

It’s not ideal, but she can work with this. “Well, hang tight, I guess. I’m going to see what I can do about getting Lance mobile and then we’ll work our way towards yo—“

As abruptly as they’d stopped, she’s cut off by a guttural scream. She flinches. That one sounded… forced. Like he literally shoved it from his chest by sheer will, expelling the sound from somewhere deep inside.

“Coran—“ Pidge tries. She’s cut off by a second scream. He’s falling back into his rhythm now, except now every third or fourth one tapers off into gurgling sobs. He doesn’t sound good. “Just try to keep him calm!” she shouts in one quick huff of breath.

Coran is already back to speaking softly, the words not meant for anyone but Keith. Pidge leaves him to it and continues looking for Lance.

She calculates that she’s been awake for twenty minutes now, and she’s starting to get truly worried. How much of the castle is wrecked? Three of their number are still unaccounted for, and judging by the space she’s in now, the damage could be MUCH more extensive than she might have hoped. Nearly half of the team is currently lost somewhere in a veritable rockslide… they could be unconscious, or too injured to speak… or buried too far down to hear… or pinned and unable to breathe… or even already dead. Judging by the sounds of more things shifting around her with each step she takes, she doesn’t know if there’s much of a chance of any of them making it out of this alive. God, what she wouldn’t do to have Rover 6.0 with her… but he was sacrificed just last week to power a mobile satellite device that they needed to help track the galra. She swallows and keeps going.

She finds Lance by sheer luck. It is also sheer luck that she doesn’t fall into the same fucking death trap that he’s caught in. All of a sudden her foot is dangling over air, and if it weren’t for the extensive training they’ve been doing, she would have slipped right in. Well, that and the fact that there was something within shooting distance of her bayard’s grappling hook. She clings to the handle as she listens to a few rocks bounce down. The cord whines, stretched to its limit.

“Hey,” Lance says. She looks down.

Judging by the lights on his armor, he’s huddled up at the bottom, buried up to the hips in fist-sized chunks of wall that seem to shift ominously every time he moves. His hands press against either side of the small chasm, and he looks up through the spidery remains of piping, peering through visor glass so scratched that it’s a miracle he can even see her. He’s right—even at the mouth of the hole the screaming gets just a little softer. Pidge decides to be grateful for small favors.

“Are you hurt?” she asks, carefully swinging to put her feet on the edge closest to her.

“Couple broken toes, I think. My armor took most of the damage—the jetpack is out of order at the moment. Could have been worse, but I was weaving through falling building like a _badass_. I could have my own action movie franchise.”

Pidge laughs, and even though it sounds hollow against a particularly high-pitched scream, she’s glad that she still has something small to laugh about. For now. She decides it’s high time to get to work.

What does she have to work with? Her jetpack, now functional. She taps two fingers on her thigh, thinking. Too bad she can’t just toss it down to Lance. Hm. What else? Her bayard is obviously going to come in handy, but she’s much too light to lift Lance out on her own and she doubts that she’ll find anything sturdy to wrap the bayard around. 

She promptly runs into a metaphorical wall, screwing up her mouth as she reaches the end of her list of supplies.

Lance waits for all of thirty seconds before asking hopefully, “So, uh… how we getting me out?”

Pidge sighs. “I don’t know. Give me a second to figure it out. Is your comm working at all?”

“It’s unclear. I thought I got hold of Hunk for a few seconds when I first woke up, but it might have been wishful thinking.”

“Was there feedback?” she asks, thinking about her own malfunction. It’s possible that it’s just her helmet that’s reacting badly with the castle system—some faulty wire inside that hasn’t reattached itself yet—but more likely it’s an issue with the castle itself. One of many, she’s sure. She’s just grateful that it seems like life support is still online.

“Not really. It came up and then staticked out. I think I’m too far away from the system for my helmet to do whatever the quiznak yours just did. It was more like a cellphone that was out of range.”

“That’s… weird. The entire castle is like a moving network, there should be working receptors in whatever I’m standing on.”

Lance just shrugs, a rise of the lights on his shoulders. “Can we get on with it? I’d climb out, but no good handholds, you know. Also wary of burying myself alive.”

Pidge grunts. She pokes at a pipe near the top of the hole, wincing as it bends under her hand. “I’m going to go find something sturdy to loop my bayard around. There’s _got_ to be something around here. You’ll grab the end, I’ll get the handle, and then I’ll use my jetpack to counterbalance you.”

“…You’re not gonna shock me, right?”

“No? Quit messing around,” she says, already moving away. His indignant ‘hey!’ becomes secondary to the screaming.

A moment later, her jetpack comes to life with a whoosh. The debris around her kicks up in definition, put in sharp relief by the light of the flares. She shoots up toward the upper edge of their bubble—and up, and up, and up. This particular bubble is actually huge, she thinks with a frown. As she climbs near the new ceiling she sees something glimmering, different from the dust and rubble. She gets close enough to touch and it’s… Huh. It’s water. Flowing on the ceiling. She decides not to think about that for now. Partly because she’d have to admit that Lance and Keith’s fantastic tales of an upside-down pool were actually true. 

She shakes her head. Not happening.

Looking down again, she realizes she’s almost a hundred feet above Lance’s hole. She can barely see the floor—the light makes it seem hazy and distant. Yeah, her bayard can _not_ reach that far. She looks around. A beam, two beams, haphazardly reaching for the ceiling catch her attention. It’s a catwalk, perched vertically near her. Now THAT might help.

Dangling from the ceiling with her bayard to give the jetpack a rest, she smacks the catwalk. It wobbles. Not sturdy on its own, but maybe she can still use it. She looks at the far side of the cavern-bubble and quickly calculates.

“Lance?” she calls.

“WHAT?” she barely hears back.

“I’m about to make a lot of—“

“WHAT?”

“NOISE, LANCE. ME. MAKING. NOISE.”

“I DON’T—“

Oh, for quiznaks sake! She rolls her eyes and maneuvers to the other side of the catwalk, where she puts her hands on the cold metal and PUSHES. Her jetpack strains. Her shoulder strains back. The base rumbles. Her entire body presses against the beam, sandwiching her between an immovable object and an unstoppable force, a rock and a hard place, another metaphor, until—

—It tips. It falls exactly as she predicted.

She half expects a moment of silence when it lands with a crash, caught against the far side of the chasm, but Keith just keeps screaming. She goes back down and alights at Lance’s hole, recalculating. The catwalk is now about twenty feet above her head. Much better. Her bayard can do that.

Lance, when he speaks again, sounds shaken. “Was that what you were trying to say?” he wheezes. “Hey, Lance, watch out, tower falling on you?!”

“Nope. I said I was about to make a lot of noise.” She shoots him a cheeky smile before she sends her bayard up. He grumbles something about _finding a way to do it without scaring the cheese out of him_ as she catches the end again as it loops over the catwalk and falls to the other side. She threads it down the hole, through the largest gaps in the piping, hoping that Lance can make it through those. 

When it reaches him, Lance pokes at it. His face is lit up green and she thinks she can see a pout. _What now_? she wants to ask, venom milked from fear on the back of her tongue.

“Well?” she demands instead, trying to soften her voice.

He looks up. “I was hoping for a witty one-liner or something? But yeah, okay, never mind. _Don_ _’t_ shock me, I’m coming.”

Pidge flies up to get leverage, and as soon as she feels his full weight on the other end, she begins pulling. He keeps talking. 

“…like think about it, dude, this is the PERFECT time to make a catch phrase. Try this one—‘in case of disaster it’s good to have a Pidge.’ Eh?”

“That’s…” _bad,_ she wants to say. He always comes up with the worst dialogue at the worst times. But as she pulls, as his weight settles on the other end of the bayard, as Keith screams somewhere beyond them, the realization sinks down into her bones. This is a disaster. A catastrophe. They are experiencing an event that is endangering every single life aboard the ship. They will be lucky to make it out alive.

She lets the jetpack take over, and when she feels Lance’s weight still not budging, she turns in the air and braces her feet against the catwalk. Like HELL if this is going to get the better of her. He slowly begins to rise, grabbing onto handholds as he passes. She can hear loose things that he touches falling back into the hole below him. It sounds like it’s ready to swallow him again, god willing, but she grunts with effort, focusing. 

“God… is not… willing!” she snarls.

And then he’s up, his feet scrabbling at the edges of the hole where she’d previously been perched. She swings around and grabs him, jetpacking them a few feet over before dropping the both of them back onto a flat, stable surface. They both flinch, waiting… but it holds. 

They high five and Pidge dramatically whips her bayard back into her hand. “It’s good to see you,” she says as they trade once-overs, checking each other for injuries. They have to lean closer to talk because it’s loud as hell, but for the first time since she woke up, Pidge feels like they actually might have a chance.

In unison they rise, and start walking toward the screaming. Pidge feels Lance’s hand thread through her elbow, hooking their arms together. They hold onto each other, talking directly into each other’s ears to be able to hear anything over Keith, and even though Lance is limping and Pidge’s shoulder aches they walk into the darkness with heads held high.

Until Lance suddenly leans down, plucking something from under his bad foot. “Does this look like a plate to you?” he asks, holding it up. The lights on his arms light up a shattered piece of plastic.

“Must be from the kitchen. That means we’re getting closer,” Pidge says, grabbing it and flipping it this way and that. Just like she’s never seen the insides of the castle walls before, she’s never seen one of the Altean plates break before. She does NOT want to imagine the kind of force required to do such a thing.

Time splinters as they follow a growing trail of plates and cutlery. Food goo splatters the walls, the ripped out innards of the ship laid bare for all to see. The screaming seems to stagnate, not getting louder and never getting closer, but always somewhere ahead of them. Most of the plates are too broken to be recognizable as anything more than slight glitters amid the rock, little flecks of light on the path ahead. The ceiling begins to lower down on top of them—the space narrows dangerously at times, forcing them to take turns squeezing through small gaps. Pidge thinks that there must still be open space above them with how the sound echoes, but they can’t reach it, and it’s safer to stick close to the one wall they find that’s still actually intact.

They are coming through another tight fit when something moves in the near-dark, disturbing a little puff of dust. Pidge sees it even without Lance gripping her arm like a vice, but now he’s shaking her sharply and she has to punch him in the stomach to make him stop. His exhalation of air can’t be heard.

“MOUSE,” Pidge hollers, and as she grins another one appears, moving in single file and tapping the ground carefully to find the sturdiest footrests. A whole line of them appear, four teeny little shapes jumping from foothold to foothold with practiced ease until a much larger shape materializes behind them.

Her heart leaps. “ _ALLURA!_ ” Lance screams, and even though it rattles her bones, Pidge can’t help but grin right along with him. 


	4. Pleural

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Allura, Shiro, and... ah, yes, how could Pidge forget?

Allura turns toward them the moment Lance calls out, halting in her tracks. She’s also scrambling through the debris, obviously using Keith and Coran like a road flare, same as them. Her face is pale and her stance a little wobbly as she presses one hand against the wall, but she’s upright, and it’s the best news Pidge has gotten since she woke. Allura catches sight of them in the darkness and her face splits into a smile, half-hidden between waves of hair that have obviously come undone from a neat bun.

“Allura!” Pidge says again, taking advantage of Keith momentarily breaking down into echoey sobs. The relief makes her knees wobbly as she grabs Lance and moves toward the princess. “Are you okay?”

Allura nods. She doesn’t try to speak as another scream lurches through the air, but a cough seems to claw up her chest and she leans into it, chest rattling, clutching her side. She waits for the air to clear again before she speaks. “I’ve broken something… inside. Shiro was with me, he took most of the beating. We were in the command center… it didn’t collapse, thankfully, but I was the only one small enough to get through the debris blocking the door. Well, and the mice.” She looks fondly ahead of her—the mice are sniffing and patting at the ground ahead of her, indicated where she should step.

“Is Shiro okay?” Lance asks, his eyes huge. Pidge, too, catches the tightness in the tendons in Allura’s neck as she mentions the Black Paladin, and they stare at Allura with huge eyes, waiting for her answer.

Before Allura can respond, however, Keith suddenly lights up with a particularly desperate scream. “No, no, don’t move--!” they hear Coran saying—the three of them exchange looks. Malaise, determination, fear. Pidge shakes off the fear and repeats her list in her head—triage, team, lions.

“Allura,” she says, leaning close enough to speak over the noise. “Is there any way to bypass the castle comm system? Last time I turned on my helm comms, it freaked out.”

The Princess considers it, her pained, scared eyes flicking to the mice as she shares words with them. “Yes… some of the consuls in the command center are still connected to power, but they were too high for us to reach, even the mice. You’ll be able to adjust anything that still has power if you can get to them.”

“Is it safe to go back that way?” Lance ask skeptically, staring into the uninviting darkness.

“Safe enough for Pidge, I think. I tried to mark the sturdiest footholds.” Allura gestures to her feet, where a single twisted silver hair gleams in the light of their suits.

Pidge nods. That was smart thinking. “Okay. I’ll head there and check it out, see what I can do for Shiro; you guys try and find a safe path to Keith.”

“Understood,” Lance says, and Pidge isn’t sure if she should be grateful at how serious he sounds. The longer that Keith screams the lower Lance’s eyebrows hang, carving lines of worry across his face. It’s almost more ominous than the dust settling all around them. “Try to find Hunk if you can get any of the cameras up and running.”

“Ten-four,” Pidge says, and they split off. Following Allura’s trail is easy—it guides her through a couple of rooms that are almost intact, obviously leading toward the center of the castle. Most of the furniture was bolted to the ground or carved into the floors—it now hangs at her side, ominous. The further she goes, the softer the screams get, and she tries not to let that get to her.

Unfortunately, by the time she’s getting close, the screaming is muffled in the distance and nearly incomprehensible. She’s able to hear water dripping. It sounds like it’s moving… up? Damnit, more evidence for the pool theory. It’s only been a few minutes, but everything is so quiet now that she’s a little worried she’ll lose the sound of Keith completely and not be able to find her way back. The terror latches onto her chest—she has to convince herself that Allura’s trail still exists. She _will_ be able to find him. God, she just wants to find him… that screaming is NOT helping her nerves. She tries not to think about how one of the paladins in the worst pain of his life has become her homing signal.

Then, like sunshine arcing through clouds on a rainy day, she finds Hunk. Or rather, she notes with relief, Hunk found Shiro. He’s standing at a small, Allura-sized gap between a wall and a huge sheet of rock, speaking softly to someone in the room beyond. He’s too big to get through the gap himself, but he’s obviously been doing his best to move the rock around. Pidge wants to cry as she picks her way over to reunite with him.

“HUNK,” she calls, as yelling her teammates’ names somehow feels right. He swings his head over, already reaching out to her.

“Thank quiznack, Pidge. I can hear Shiro but he’s not making a ton of sense. Have you found anyone else?”

She gives him the lowdown as she looks him over for injuries. He’s upright, sturdy even, but his jaw is swelling uncomfortably against his helmet and one arm is obviously dislocated inside his armor. He grins and she spots a chipped tooth, but all in all, he’s whole and healthy. And with Hunk now accounted for, she has confirmation that all seven of them are alive. The emotional rollercoaster swings upwards, making her face tremble against tears that want to pour down her wobbly smile. She gives Hunk a firm pat on his good shoulder before she wriggles through the gap and into the control room. “I’ll be back as soon as I can,” she tells him, and then she’s gone.

The command center is… darker than she expected. The room that is usually lit up with wall-to-wall viewing screens is eerie when most of them aren’t working. Pidge squints upward, looking for the few flickering monitors that offer light. When Allura said that there were consuls with power she didn’t think they’d be fifty feet above her head. The whole room is turned disorientingly on its side, making it seem larger than ever. A small noise, reminiscent of the mice, echoes out of the dark, and Pidge decides that fuck this. Just fuck this. She can’t deal with these conditions. Drawing her bayard with a sharp zzzing of electricity, she holds it out at the encroaching darkness like a torch…

…only to find, lit up in green, Shiro’s rueful grin. His helmet is barely intact, clinging to his chin by sheer force of will. “Howdy,” he says, and tucks Slav closer to his side, to his broken visor.

Pidge stares at the odd little alien and almost hits herself in the face. How did she forget about Slav???

She has no time to dwell on it.

“You here to rescue me?” Shiro says, and if the room is disorienting, the way his head seems to roll on his neck is even worse.

“…You sound suspiciously at ease,” Pidge says carefully, taking a step forward. Slav is coiled up tight around Shiro’s left arm, his silence almost as worrying as Shiro’s slurring speech. His big eyes loom in the darkness, her bayard reflecting in both as he just… stares around the room, eyes flickering around too fast to follow, his entire body trembling from beak to tail.

Shiro, meanwhile, shrugs. “Lil’… I’m a lil’ out of it, to be honest. The room spun and it feels like it’s… keep on spinning, but Allura said it wasn’t and I’m… trust… her.”

He sounds… drunk, she decides. Just really, _really_ smashed. Pidge settles down in front of the pair of them, leaning in warily. She’s never seen Slav this silent and it’s unnerving, to say the least. The way he’s clinging to Shiro for dear life speaks of tight, unrelenting anxiety. Pidge glances from them back toward where Hunk is obscured. “Well, I think we can still use your help to get out of here. The debris blocking the door isn’t piled too high—I think with Hunk working from the outside we can… why are you laughing.”

Shiro holds up one hand, the left one, Slav scrambling to keep his hold. Pidge squints, unsure where this is going. Then he raises his stump and it hits her like something solid.

Her eyes had kind of just… rolled over his right shoulder, not taking it in, but now that it’s right in front of her she feels a little lost. Like something profound happened and she just barely missed it. “Your arm…” she gasps. “What happened to it? Where is it? How did it disconnect? It seemed so seamless, what kind of connection point did it have? Can I see it?”

Shiro snickers into Slav’s fur, his head rolling back again. “Sure. You’re standing in it.”

“In… it?”

She looks down and holds her bayard close to the ground, only to find… it’s shattered. There are pieces of galra tech all around her feet, scattered all across the screen they’re currently using as a floor. The largest chunk she can find is what she thinks is the lower joint of his thumb. She picks it up, in shock.

“What’s going on?” Hunk calls, having decided the quiet was dragging on too long, and Pidge swallows. She scrambles to find something to say that ISN’T the hysteria bubbling past her teeth.

Finally, she settles on, “Just, uh… Shiro’s planning on filing for disability this year, is all.”

Hunk grunts, not really understanding and not really caring beyond the fact that they’re still talking. Shiro laughs a little harder, loose limbs shivering with it, and has to brace his one good hand on the ground to stop himself from toppling over. Slav whines deep in his throat and clings tighter, three sets of little claws digging into Shiro’s side. Shiro doesn’t seem to notice. Pidge gets down close, assessing the rest of them, trying to think of something else she can do because Shiro is starting to really worry her. His face is bloody under the remnants of his visor, most of it coming from his nose. He might have torn open some of the scar tissue from the wound across his face, but aside from the obvious head trauma and the fact that his ARM IS MISSING, he seems okay. He’s more battered than anything, not much obviously broken, and Slav… Slav just seems terrified.

“Hunk, just keep working at the door,” Pidge says. “You two… stay there. I’ll go check out the rest of the room, just in case.”

She prepares to turn on her jetpack, patting Shiro’s exposed cheek. Shiro leans into her touch, swaying even though he’s sitting. She briefly bumps her visor to his, trying to catch his eyes—they aren’t focusing very well, but something about the fact that he’s not panicking grounds her a little.

“I need you to focus on staying awake,” she tells him.

“Yessir,” he says, with a clumsy twitch of his stump that reminds her of a salute.

The grin she lets out before raising her bayard and shooting the grappling hook up into the ‘ceiling’ is, she thinks, pretty reminiscent of Lance. This, at least, might be fun—what did he say about badass adventure movie protagonists? He’s not going to have anything on her by the time she sorts out these computers. She zips up with a small whoop and hangs beside one of the working consoles, starting to type away with one hand—it’s the injured one, so she can hold onto her bayard with the sturdier one, but it’s such a familiar action that she doesn’t even notice the pain. The system sputters for only a moment before it boots all the way up, holoscreens lighting up her face.

Castle comms, castle comms… in moments she finds a toggle for them and switches the boost off. She turns on her helmet again, bracing for impact, but this time it works properly. There is a ping in her ear and all the other helmets in the castle boot up and return the signal, strong. She can suddenly hear Hunk’s heavy breathing, Allura’s little gasps, Shiro giggling softly through thick static, Coran mumbling in Altean, Lance grunting with every new scream, and… the helm is good at sound balancing, so Keith is only as loud as he would be if he were standing beside her, but the screams are suddenly crystal clear again. She winces.

“Whoa… is that Keith?” Hunk gasps, grinding to a halt.

“Yeah,” Lance says “Oh, man, my ears are ringing… it’s getting hard to tell what direction it’s even coming from, it’s like we’re surroun—HUNK! HUNK, BUDDY, IT’S YOU!”

“Sure is!”

“ _Mierda_ , I thought I’d never hear your beautiful voice again—are you okay? Where are you?”

“With me and Shiro,” Pidge says, continuing to hack at the keyboard, answering on autopilot. “And Slav,” she adds as an afterthought. She’s really got to stop forgetting that guy.

The conversation turns into murmurs around her as she focuses again. She’s finding that a lot of the castle systems are actually online, they’re just… much smaller than they used to be. Only a radius of sixty meters of the cameras are fully functional—further than that, they start getting weird and staticky, cutting out randomly. She tries to find the Lion’s hangers anyway, because she’s starting to get desperate at Keith’s ragged breathing. He’s still going and she doesn’t have any idea HOW. All she knows is that she keeps expecting to hear the deep bubble of fluid in his lungs, or his breath running out… but it doesn’t happen. His voice, though wrecked by misuse, is still clear. Strong, bewilderingly so, despite the fact that he just… keeps… screaming.

She pushes it from her mind. A moment later, she finds video of herself and Shiro, the feed wonky and slanted. The camera is hanging somewhere below her, to the right, barely catching the top of Shiro’s head. Then, a moment later, she finds Hunk. The lens of the camera is cracked but it’s still functional. She can work with that. She leaves both feeds open and keeps looking.

“Keith…” comes a mumbling voice from below, barely coming through the comm. Pidge winces as his voice cracks. “Keith? Buddy, please…”

Pidge grits her teeth and flips through whole sections of the castle that are completely dark, or are glitching out too hard to get a read. Even though seventy percent of the cameras are completely out of commission, she has enough visuals to feel hope start to rise in her chest, only to get stamped out as another set flickers and dies. Her hand aches where she clutches her bayard’s handle. She’s about to give it up as a lost cause when she finds a small corridor that’s still lit properly, the cameras functioning, and, incredibly, mostly clear of debris. She cross references the castle blueprints and confirms—it’s near the hangars. It would make sense that they were especially reinforced. A few more clicks aaand… VIDEO. Thank god, she’s found it! The squeeze of her chest lightens just a little.

“Shiro!” she calls down. “I have visual on the hangars! I can see Coran, so Keith must be nearby. It’s going to be okay, okay Shiro?”

The mumbles she receives back confirm that Shiro is… all but useless at the moment. He tries to talk and his words come out in a word salad, even less clear in his distress. “Please, please… don’t Keith, don’t hurt, let him go… please, now, please, I… don’t have feet, I can’t, please someone…”

“I think he feels bad that he can’t get to you guys,” Hunk translates. “Pidge, can you see how close Lance and Allura are?” he grunts, still working at one of the slabs. It groans as he puts more weight behind it, bracing his shoulder against it.

Pidge squints for a moment, tracing the lines of the mostly-intact hallways on her screen. A moment later, two heads pop into view, distorted. “Yeah! They’re almost there. Lance, is your helm cam working?”

She sees mini-him on the monitor tap at his helmet for a moment, and then a new feed comes up in front of her, from Lance’s point of view. “Is it good? I can’t really tell, my visor’s still too scratched up.”

“Yeah, it’s up. Just keep going—hurry!”

Lance grunts in affirmative. While she waits, Pidge works on doing half a pull-up so that she can hook her elbow around her bayard to give her screaming hand a break. She can’t see either Keith or Coran at first as Lance comes out into the space with the Red Lion, but she knows by looking at the other feed that Coran is somewhere to his right. Keith is so loud that the outer mic on Lance’s helmet, probably already compromised, shorts out. Lance visibly winces on screen but keeps moving. Pidge watches as both Lance and Allura press hands to their ears, Lance beneath his helmet, loosening them whenever Keith takes a breath to try and get words across the shattered silence.

“Coran, can you—“

“—Can’t see him, either—“

“—I think I can hear—“

“—THERE—“

What Lance points to is the Red Lion, looming in the gloom. Nestled under her tail is Coran’s flailing form, trying to get their attention. Lance is quick to step over—from this angle it’s clear that her tail is wrecked, possibly beyond repair. A huge sliver of glass-like substance from some nearby viewport has been driven straight through it and into the slab of wall that Red is lying on. It’s like a butterfly pinned to a board, except in this case the butterfly is the prehensile blaster attached to an enormous feline-shaped warship. Coran, trapped, was only a few feet away from being cleaved in two. He doesn’t seem particularly bothered as he keeps beckoning them forward. He’s lying on his stomach, his feet kicking, and he seems to be reaching—

Allura and Lance duck into the space that Red is curled around, and finally, FINALLY, Pidge can see him. Coran, when he lies flat and reaches as far as he can, is just barely able to stroke the little tufts of hair that stick up at the sides of Keith’s head. His helmet has been tossed to the side—Coran must have managed to hook a finger around it to shimmy it off. There’s a chunk of the visor missing, along with most of the tech on that side. 

As Lance makes his way forward, Keith ends his current scream. He curls up slightly, his head dragging, limp, after his tightening abdominal muscles. Coran stretches as his hair slips out of reach. 

The three figures now watching pause in tandem for a moment, processing what they see. It’s… not good, are the first words to come to Pidge’s mind. Not good. Nowhere near good.

Really, really not good.


	5. Neural

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Keith's condition.

Another breath, another scream rising up his throat, and Keith’s head flops, jittery, back into Coran’s reach. Coran strokes his bloody hair, trying to distract him, to soothe him, but that, it seems, is impossible because he doesn’t seem to be able to do anything except claw at the fence post-sized piston that stabs him through the gut.

And, of course, _scream_. 

Pidge sucks in a lungful of air, and watches in shock as Coran strains a little, trying to stroke the red paladin’s head. Lance’s hands float onscreen, hovering in front of him as if he wants to reach out but he doesn’t know what to do. His head darts around to look at the carnage around them—Red’s neck, punctured by a piece of faux-glass; power cables, frayed and sparking, pouring out the gap; gears and pistons embedded in the ground and walls like shrapnel, leaving horrid incisions in what remains of the castle. It takes a lot to hurt a Lion, Pidge knows. But somehow the glass-like material hit her at juuust the right angle and the mechanisms that made up her musculature gave way with explosive force. With the way she’s wrapped around him, it’s a miracle that Keith was only hit with one or… two pieces…

Pidge feels her gut twist as Lance ducks close to the swelling, awful mess that is his right eye. Sure, miracle, except where the ‘miracle’ left him lying in a puddle of blood that’s been growing so long that the edges are becoming tacky.

Pidge focuses on watching Lance’s hands move. He presses gently on Keith’s heaving chest, knocking away the wet fingers that slip on the sleek metal impaling his lower abdomen. Keith’s gloves are scuffed where he’s been clawing at his shattered armor. He lets out another long, awful scream, and Lance presses experimentally against the piston. It doesn’t so much as budge. Keith’s vocal chords are ragged, it doesn’t sound like him at all—his good eye is barely open, unseeing as Lance leans over him, and his bad one is… well. Dried tears and gummed up blood streak his face, but it looks like he’s too dehydrated and has lost too much blood to cry anymore. Lance palms at his deathly pale face, running a hand through his hair, hitting tangles at the back that are matted together with blood and dust. Stringy black strands are knotted around Lance’s fingers when he pulls back. As the scream comes to an end Keiith’s spine curls, and he tilts his head to the side and away from Lance, muscles jerking, listing just an inch or so—just enough for them to see how his hair sticks to the floor, blood tacky like glue. 

The noise gurgles to a halt, but he flops back with a shudder that rips through his whole body and he gasps air in, as much as he can. He’s finally starting to slow down a little—it takes a little longer for him to get enough air in, but he’s determined and after a moment he manages. He screams again. And gasps, roiling against Lance’s placating hands. And screams. His fingers slip in the blood slowly oozing up around the piston. He gasps, his face twisting. And he screams. Winds down into a hiccupping sob. He clutches at the piston, at the place where it splits his abdomen… and that’s when Pidge realizes.

“Keith…” she says, and she’s soft but she’s also not really scared anymore because she’s starting to feel numb. Her voice is almost too soft, drowned out amid all the others. “Oh, Keith…”

Lance glances over to Allura, who crouches at the red paladin’s head, threads her fingers through his hair, and holds on. It’s a futile attempt to ground him. Coran pats at her back from an awkward angle as Keith continues to scream.

“What is it?” Lance shouts into the mic, one step from panicking. “What did it hit? Why do you sound like that? Pidge?”

She’s not jumping to conclusions… but as she finally gets the internal tracking systems up and running, she’s pretty sure of what she’s going to find when she pulls up Keith’s signature. She flips through to find the right system, the right scans. They’re fuzzy, a little glitchy, but enough of the scanners are working that she can tell… yeah, she’s right. She takes her time replying. “…His pelvis. It hit the bone—it’s going right through it.”

And just like that, the rollercoaster twists down in a tight corkscrew. It’s like a horror movie, except Pidge never felt scared by special effects. The whole castle seems to go quiet for a moment—the omnipresence of war and death that always follows them settles at each and every one of their throats. The far-off rumblings of castleship insides settling go even more distant. Everyone stops breathing. No air comes over the comms. There is a moment of deep, terrified silence. Pidge looks down at the floor between her swinging feet and sees that Shiro is taking off his helmet, sloppily, one-handed, only to toss it aside and curl up, covering his face with his hand. Slav clings even tighter. For a moment, even Keith seems to stop—in the wake of his screaming her heart has another of those moments of panic, where she imagines that he’s finally succumbing to what she now knows are MASSIVE internal injuries… but then he breathes out a small sob and she decides, fuck this.

It’s time to grow Determined. She’s tired of this day, she wants nothing more than to just sleep for fourteen goddamn hours, but she can’t have that. She sucks a deep breath in through her nose, pushes it out her mouth to the sound of Shiro sobbing below her, and strikes her internal flint. Through sheer force of will, she takes the rollercoaster and drives it back up toward the sky. They can DO THIS, Shiro’s voice rings in her head—this isn’t forming Voltron, but it’s still her team, and she knows they can’t back down. Not now, not ever. The only direction they can go is forward.

“Allura, how do we save him?” she demands. Rumblings start up again as Hunk gets back to work with a newfound anger totally unlike his normal self.

Allura pauses to think for a second, Lance frantically glancing between her and Keith’s waxy face as he tries to apply pressure around the piston. “Coran, you won’t like this.”

“…I never do,” he says, wearily. “Well, go on. Tell us.”

“We’ll need a cryopod. I’m not sure where they are, or if any of them are still intact, but… we can’t move him. If there is one, we’re going to need it here. There’s enough power down here to keep it going for long enough to get him out of immediate danger. Without the pod, the rest of my plan is useless.”

Pidge immediately sets to work. Her elbow is now starting to ache, too, from where she’s hanging, but she ignores it. It takes mere seconds to find data on the pods. “Two pods are functional. The entire room has been dislocated—it looks like it’s in two main pieces, one just, uh… the nav system is down so I’m just guessing here, but if I’m North of you guys, we’ll call this West of you. It’s going to need some serious equipment to excavate, though. It’s under several tons of metal.”

Hunk finally moves the last of the debris and comes into the command center, panting. “I can feel Yellow. She’s okay, but she doesn’t want to move in case she causes a rockslide. If we can get her to open space, she can come around the side and dig them out.”

“Good,” Allura says. “I’ll leave the three of you to that. Lance, you and me are going to free Coran. Then, the three of us will—“

“Wait,” Lance says, and he sounds breathless over the comms, like he can’t get enough air. Pidge’s heart almost drops, but then he strikes a pose and she grins. “We’re split into teams. This is perfect! We need team names RIGHT NOW!”

Everyone can almost feel the way Allura’s face pinches in frustration, but she kneels back on her heels and gestures for him to get on with it.

He doesn’t disappoint, talking as fast as he can. “As the group with the most physically striking specimens, we will be Team Gorgeous-Really-Amazingly-Movingly-Pretty-Saviors, or Team Gramps, for short.” Pidge snorts. “They’ll be… Team Dugtrio.”

At that, Hunk bursts out laughing. Shiro raises his head, and, realizing that he’s missing important things, scrambles to get his helmet back on. He’s still dizzy and out of it, and Hunk has to help—with both of them using one hand they’re almost functional. Shiro settles back and tucks Slav against his side with his good hand. “We having a plan? Is Keith… plan?” he asks, his voice only a little bit slurred.

“Yes.” Allura has steel in her voice. “Part one: Team… Dugtrio, was it? Brings a healing pod to Team Gramps while Team Gramps figures out how to free Coran and Keith with the least amount of injury. Part two: I will use some of my quintessence to—“

Coran TWISTS under Red’s tail, his eyes huge. “You’re injured, as well! This is no time to go straining yourself—“

“I’m hurt, yes… but I’m not dying.”

Coran stills. “…You don’t know how to control it. Any of it. Are you sure you can…?”

“I will never forgive myself if I don’t try,” Allura says softly, pressing her hand to Coran’s back. He nods. “So: I will use some of my quintessence to hold together the, erm… ragged edges, so to speak, of Keith’s main injury. I’ve no doubt that having the piston there has kept it all mostly inside him, but once it’s gone, we will be on a ticker. A shorter ticker.”

“So part three, we need to get the pod set up and get him into it ASAP,” Pidge says. She watches the video intently as Allura nods—Lance is back to pressing against Keith’s wound, knocking his hands away whenever they try to wander down.

“We’ll also want to figure out… where we are,” Shiro says, dazed. He’s obviously trying really hard to be coherent, but Pidge can’t say it’s working too well. “I can’t… can’t really think, but I’m sure we have a lot of… long terms, and I’m… I’m not going to be…” Acid fills Pidge’s mouth as he says the last words. “…not very good.”

The rollercoaster dips again. God, she’s tired of this. Tired of life, tired of everything, Pidge tunes out Hunk talking carefully to Shiro and turns on her jetpack, yanking her bayard out of its hold on the ceiling. She then viciously attacks the casing of the component of the computer that she’s termed the hard drive—it isn’t really, but it’s close enough. After a moment it pops out, the picture of Allura and Lance trying to free Coran fizzling out. She then dissects the rest of the computer, taking the important parts, crystal and all. Just as the jetpack starts to strain she lowers herself back to the floor.

“Is there anything of use in this room?” she asks. “It’s the only place that’s actually kinda intact, I haven’t seen much to scavenge.”

Shiro is… shaking. But he hears her and lifts his head. “…in the… up… there’s…” and he makes a gesture like he’s crossing himself. Red Cross. _Emergency medical supplies._ She gleefully scales a wall using her bayard to get them. She finds spare helmets and oxygen tanks, too—she picks up one for Shiro and one for Slav.

“Time is of the essence, we need to get you guys patched up as fast as we can so we can—“

Pidge’s words are cut off by Hunk, who screams as Shiro lurches upright, grabs him, and relocates his arm.

“Are you guys okay?” Lance demands, through the grunts on the other end of the comms.

“Fine,” Pidge says, half in wonder. Shiro looks vaguely pleased with himself—Slav seems shaken, completely unprepared for the movement. “Apparently Shiro has a superpower. The superpower to fix dislocated limbs even with a concussion.”

“Some warning next time?” Hunk says, tears in his eyes.

Shiro is now clinging to him to stay upright, thankfully on his good side. “Yellow,” he says emphatically, staring deep into Hunk’s eyes. Hunk and Pidge exchange a look.

“…We’re gonna have to see what we can do about getting Shiro on the list for pod time,” Pidge says, pressing a piece of gauze to his face. Shiro just taps at her wrist.

A moment later they’re on their way, everyone equipped with non-broken helmets. Pidge rigs up the computer to attach to her belt, firing it up as they walk, trusting that Hunk can see Allura’s breadcrumb trail well enough to keep them moving.

“Can I get you guys to connect to your lions? I don’t need all of them, but if I can get a better grasp on where Yellow is I can help her navigate better,” Hunk says.

Pidge nods, already reaching, now booting up the video feeds again. Down by the hangars, Allura is holding up Red’s tail as far as she can while Lance grips Coran’s feet and tugs. Coran slides out inch by painful inch.

“No problemo,” Lance grunts, and she feels a soft, sweet little PING as Blue’s frequency comes to attention, winding around Yellow and Green’s. A moment later, Coran slips free with a comical POP.

Shiro has his face scrunched up, a muscle in his temple twitching.

“Shiro, don’t hurt yourself, it’s okay—“ Hunk starts, but then Black joins them with a shiver of triumph.

The only one left now is the Red Lion herself, and it’s unlikely that she’ll move, not with the damage she’s sustained. Hunk pays no mind, already getting into gear—Yellow is nestled with Black and Blue, in a dinged up pile, very much awake and aware. They’re still in the hangar—behind Red, who had been coming toward the residential areas in order to get to Keith. Green is some distance away, but because of her lightness and speed, she’d also reacted to the crash—not to come to Pidge, but to slam down as many vines as she possibly could, sewing the inside of the lower half of the ship together to save as much structural integrity as possible. Pidge grins—they’d been practicing that for a while now. Using the chlorokinesis when Pidge wasn’t in the cockpit wasn’t easy, but when they were in sync they could make it work. Finally, she knows what she was doing during the crash—she was calculating vine placement on the fly. Not so much that the weight would bring everything down, but enough to keep the walls together.

That also clears up why Green had so much urgency in the mental link. She was literally holding the place together with twine.

It’s now been sixty minutes since Pidge woke up. She swallows.

“Here’s the good news: Yellow is really close to the pods. Bad news: I’m pretty sure that Red is between her and them.”

Keith screams, as if accentuating Hunk’s point. On her screen, Pidge sees Red’s eyes flicker as if she’d heard. As if she’s starting to get impatient. As if they needed to save her paladin or she’d do it herself, with what little she had left.

“They’re at the hangar doors, right?” Pidge says, thinking fast. “It would be quicker and less dangerous to go out and around. Two major problems with that, though—One, I can’t get any of the outside sensors to work without getting closer to their individual signals, so I don’t know what we’d let in by opening the doors, and two, we’d have to find a way to get the Lions back through the hull at their destination point.”

“Can’t we just, like…” Hunk makes a motion like a cat pawing at the ground.

“Hunk… the castle is made of the Altean equivalent of _titanium_.”

“We can still try, though? I’m pretty sure the Lions are a match for it.”

Pidge sighs. “Princess? Coran? Is there anything you can think of that can atmospherically seal you guys in for a while? I’m not sure the filtration systems could handle us opening the outer doors, and I’m not sure if the airlocks are working.” A few more taps at the computer. “Scratch that—at least two airlocks are out of commission.” Technology is failing her. She’s not pleased.

For a few ticks, there’s silence. Or, more accurately, everyone stays quiet as Keith screams. Then he’s gasping, giving them the opportunity to speak. 

Coran begins to say something into the void, but the words are drowned out by a sudden _roar_.

“Oh, shi—” Hunk says, throwing his good arm out as the floor shakes—and dust rises from the debris around them—things are falling in the gloom around them—and Pidge’s gut clenches with sudden fear that this is it—this is the moment everything comes crashing down—holy shit—she’s not ready—

—and then things settle down again. “What the heck was that?” Hunk asks. Pidge glances around—nothing. She shrugs, looking down to her screen again.

…Red’s barrier is up, sealing Team Gramps inside it. “…That’ll work,” she breathes. She thanks the gods that Red didn’t get the barrier up before the others got there—she doesn’t want to think about Coran and Keith trapped inside, alone, with help _so close_.

In the sudden quiet, Keith’s ragged gasps are more than clear. His breath is starting to sound disturbingly wheezy, and the screams are getting rarer. Every sixth or seventh breath he manages to get one out, but when he does they’re as loud and drawn out as ever. If Pidge had to guess, she’d say that they probably have his hardy Galra blood to thank for that. 

As long as he holds on. As long as it’s enough to keep him alive until they can get a pod to him. That’s all they need—they just need a few more minutes.

“Here goes nothing,” Hunk says. He closes his eyes, and there’s another castle-shaking bang, and then a literal breath of fresh air, as Yellow takes off.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This may be the final update for a while. The next chapter is only halfway complete at this point in time. 
> 
> Comments are greatly appreciated! Cheers!


	6. Viscera

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> The plan is set in motion!

Plan set in motion, Pidge takes a moment to assess. First: the computer. There has to be a way to make this thing mobile.

Breath, breath, breath, _scream_. Keith peters off again, falling into low whines that echo across Allura’s comms as she kneels beside him, stroking his hair back. In front of her, at Keith’s midsection, Lance and Coran work at the piston, trying to pry it free. Even with both of them together they make no headway—it doesn’t want to budge. “Your fellow paladins are working to save you…” Allura says over the noise, soothing. “They’re coming for you, Keith, and they will make this pain go away…”

Half the length of the Castle away from the hangars, Yellow has started to scratch at the outer shell of the ship, moving more carefully now. She can smell the material of the pods, or, more accurately, sense the energy that usually flows through that room with whatever Lion sense equates to scent. Even through all the layers of building materials, the sense of it is strong enough to flow back across the link to the rest of the Lions, and their paladins in turn. She is as close as she can get from the outside.

Green, meanwhile, has started pushing against Pidge’s mind like a cat headbutting its owner for attention. _Soon,_ Pidge says in response. She finishes hooking up the computer crystal to the holographic display on her bracer and expands the screen, side-eyeing the resolution. Despite the minuscule size, she has a decently clear view of Red. She arranges several more windows around that one: the view from Lance’s helm-cam, the view of the command center, and a few key points between. It’s as good as she’s going to get it.

 _Ready_? she asks. Green sends the mental image of a nod, impatient, and Pidge breathes out. She focuses on Green, on her sensors and the electrical pulses that form the consciousness of her AI. In turn, Green focuses on her senses, her pulse, invading every inch of her being.

It doesn’t take long. In mere seconds they’ve managed to resonate completely, their psyches overlapping, to create the special space where atoms form carbon-chains and carbon-chains link together and from the swirling churn of the molecules the universe gives them to work with comes seeds and shoots and vines. Pidge works on the fly, constructing diagrams of molecular structures for Green to follow—light but sturdy, strong but flexible. 

They resonate, and then, in a flash of vivid green, life _bursts forth_.

The vines unfurl first from Green’s mouth, overlapping the vines that they previously put down. Using the camera feeds that Pidge provides, the two of them start to urge the vines this way and that, letting the growths map out the freshly created crevices and caverns inside the Castle that were made from the debris and rubble. From the hangar they grow, sluicing around Red’s protective shield, curling around and finding stable paths from air bubble to air bubble, connecting them. 

They don’t stop.

They don’t falter.

They just—

—keep—

— _going_ —

—and as they do, Pidge breathes out, coming back to herself.

There. That should do it.

The vines are pushing through the far end of the ‘hallway’ outside the command center in seconds. “Time to hike,” Pidge decides. She ushers Hunk and Shiro, Slav still clinging to his side, over to the now-cleared doorway. 

“Alright,” Hunk says, hefting most of Shiro’s weight. He has to hold Shiro upright as they go, but step after sloppy step they make it to the gap. They’re mobile enough.

Pidge is the first into the hallway space. She raises her bayard high, lighting the way in vibrant green light, taking hesitant steps back the way she came. Waiting. Waiting…

It takes a minute or two, but the sound of fresh, sonic-speed plant growth is unmistakable. In the distance Green is all but rooted to the spot, focusing… concentrating… centering herself as the magic swells forth. Pidge blinks and is caught up in cellulose and chlorophyll bursting into life—she sways with the motion of the vines and nearly loses herself to the feeling. 

She shakes herself as the vines slowly wend past her, into the control room and beyond, deeper into the cavernous places from where Hunk must have come. It’s time to go. The moment the vine is thick enough to hold her weight she steps on, balancing on it—despite it still swelling under her, it’s surprisingly sturdy. She begins to walk, motioning the others forward after her.

It’s a slow procession. Shiro is unstable, swaying dangerously every time Hunk readjusts his grip. Slav is silent, deathly so—he still hasn’t let go of Shiro’s arm, limiting what little movement Shiro has. Pidge grits her teeth at the pace they set for her, focusing on her connection with Green.

And the comms. Those are important, too. She listens carefully to the sounds coming over the comm line, all of them saturated in strain. She hears it in the way Lance has gone silent, no longer working with enough air to spare for small talk. Coran is more vocal, making odd noises as they try to get a grip on the piston cleaving Keith in two. “Hweee _eeee_ —wooooo- _ahhhhhhhhhh_ —” he goes. It’s comical, almost cartoonish. Coran tends to be, but contrasted to the seriousness of the situation it’s especially striking. Compared to Keith’s screams it’s almost absurd.

And there, winding between the silence and the sound and wrapping it all together in a ribbon of reality, is Allura’s low voice. It’s rhythmic, almost melodic. “We’re here for you,” and “just hold on,” and “you’re doing so good, Keith.”

“Just a _little longer_ …” she whispers, and Pidge swallows the ache in the back of her throat. 

A little longer drags on, longer and longer still, seconds spinning into minutes. They go on like that for several of them, Team Dugtrio pacing themselves down the vine pathways and Team GRAMPS struggling with the piston, before the grunts and groans grind to a halt. Lance and Coran both pause, huffing. “Ho- _kay_ ,” Lance wheezes. Pidge can imagine him tilting his head back, hand on his hip and his hip cocked. “That thing is _not_ budging. I’m going to take a break and let Blue out to help Yellow dig up the pods.”

“Just for a minute,” Allura says from her position at Keith’s head, her gentle presence counteracting Keith’s desperate gasps. Lance hums an agreement. Then, in a sweep of fresh blue energy, the Blue Lion joins the dig-out-the-healing-pods-to-help-Keith cause. 

She isn’t the only one who wants to help, it seems. Over intermittent bursts of static, Pidge hears another mechanical giant move somewhere in the distance. Black, she assumes, stumbling in the background near Red. A quick glance at her bracer holoscreen confirms. The Black Lion has curled up close to the floor, just purring softly to encourage everything that’s going on around her, a leader doing the best she can to lead at a time when she’s all but useless.

Pidge glances from the video back toward Shiro. He’s patting Hunk on the chest with his good hand, murmuring broken phrases of encouragement. Like Lion like Paladin, it seems. Or maybe it’s the other way around? 

Maybe so. Or maybe, more likely, it’s something more intricate and complicated than simple words can convey. Yeah… that’s probably more like it. Through the years their bonds have only grown, becoming stronger and more complex—what was once nothing but a shoot, a sprout, has now grown into an enormous tree with a hundred intertwining branches, a thousand sun-reaching leaves. They’ve come to understand their Lions as if they were human, and their Lions have come to understand them as if they were robotic, and together they are the synthesis of something that is neither metal nor flesh but both, together, at once.

Ten years… they’ve been sowing these bonds for ten years, now. Pidge has to take a moment to let the awe of that realization course through her. Ten long, long years have they fought this war—growing into a family, calling the Castle home—and in one fell swoop the whole thing crashed to the ground and was dashed to pieces. 

It reminds Pidge of a memory from a time long ago, a time when she was earth-bound and only dreamed of reaching the stars. Her neighbors, a young couple with three young children, had built a treehouse for the neighborhood kids to play in. It was sturdy, made with all the right tools, all the right hardware. They were very proud of it, and it was a hit with Pidge and Matt and all their neighborhood friends. 

One day, a wind storm came. It wasn’t anything unique—it was like any number of other storms the treehouse had weathered. But a gust of wind must have hit it just right, in just the right places, because from one moment to the next Pidge heard a heart-wrenching _crack_ from her bedroom next door and there went the treehouse, hurtling to the ground.

There was no one inside, thankfully. No one underneath. No one hurt, despite the way the solid wood splintered upon impact, the way the sharp edges tore through the family’s lawn like butter. In the end the only cost was childhood disappointment and a few dollars shelled out to replant the grass. 

The Castle, on the other hand… _Keith_ …

Pidge refocuses on her own plight, watching her feet in the gloom. The going is so much easier now that she doesn’t have to judge each step. The inner corridors of the castle, broken as they are, now more closely resemble a garden-turned-thicket than the inside of an interstellar spaceship OR a rockslide. The pathway of vines has taken completely over, the splinters of stone lost beneath the greenery, and Pidge almost doesn’t recognize the place where she split off from Lance and Allura. 

She pauses there, waiting for the others to catch up.

“Which way?” Hunk asks as he comes up behind her. Pidge runs some quick calculations in her head, geometric formulas unfolding in the mindscape she shares with Green, before she gestures in a ‘westward’ direction, toward the thickest vines. 

They head off. Lance and Coran are back at it now, straining straining straining. Shiro hums broken notes. Hunk whistles a short refrain in response. Allura murmurs soft words.

And Keith… Pidge nearly stops in her tracks.

Keith isn’t screaming anymore.

She strains her ears, listening as hard as she can. She hears foliage slithering over rock, the hum of barely intact energy lines in the broken walls around her, and a faint, almost percussive sound that must be the lions trying to tunnel in… but no Keith. Not after six seconds, ten, fifteen… there nothing. Her homing signal has officially gone down. 

Okay. Okay. It’s okay. There are people there with him, now—she has visual on all four of them. The video feed is right at her fingertips, ready to come up at the press of a button. He’s okay, he must be, because Allura is still talking and Lance is still breathing heavy breaths across the line and Coran is still making those incredibly stupid-sounding _noises_ and—

 _But what if_ , her mind whispers. Ah, the curse of intelligence. She wishes she could turn off her brain, but alas. It will not be silenced. What if he’s slipping away as they work, it says. What if he’s bleeding out even as they fight to keep him alive, what if he’s hurt too badly to save and this is all for _nothing_ —?

No, spiraling will do no one any good. Pidge grits her teeth, humming a soothing tone for Green, who, through her exhaustion, had started to butt against Pidge’s mind again. “…Anyone have an update?” she asks, hoping her voice doesn’t come across as breathless as she feels. She’s reeling, running on adrenaline—it feels like her heart is going to give out any minute now.

She holds on, forces her weak heart-muscles to continue to pulse despite it all, to hear the answer.

“He’s out but still breathing,” comes Allura’s voice, and Pidge’s shoulders relax just slightly despite the fact that it, too, is strained. “He’s strong enough to fight—I had to hold him down—”

“ _I almost got kneecapped! By a dude who doesn_ _’t even know I’m here_!” Lance yells over her, part frustration and part strain. 

“—While the others work on the piston. It’s almost out, we’ve had to resort to rotating it to get any motion, and from the feel of it he’s… best I can say is, in pieces.”

So not the best news, but not the worst. Still not the worst-case scenario. They’re all still alive, still _breathing_. Pidge nods to herself. They’ll be okay. If she has any say at all, they WILL survive this and he WILL be okay and that’s what she needs to hold onto.

“On your end?” Allura barks out.

Pidge glances around. The vines’ growth has slowed down to a near standstill, but their path is clear. They’re winding their way downward, toward the nose of the ship, in an almost spiral-like pattern as they follow the woody trunk of the vine. Right now, the ‘ceiling’ is only a foot or so above Hunk’s head, but the thin tunnel they’re heading through has stayed wide enough to allow them to pass for the past few minutes. They’ve passed by one or two intact rooms—training decks, Pidge guesses, just judging by their proximity to the hangars. She marks them on the map of the wreckage that she’s slowly started to build from the cameras and sensors they pass by.

As for the team itself… Pidge glances back yet again, taking quick stock. Shiro is swaying on his feet, looking sick but resolved at the news about Keith. His remaining hand keeps trying to clutch at his head like that’ll help his obviously reeling vision, but Hunk keeps pulling it back, and back, and back, ever patient. Hunk is still going, slow but steady, holding Shiro and Slav steady as well. His steadfast determination fuels the strength of Pidge’s sense of purpose, keeping her moving, moving, moving despite how slow she’s forced to go, trickling downward like the sweat dripping down her temples.

It feels like they’ve been stepping foot in front of foot for years, for decades, but it can’t be much farther now.

“We’ll be there soon enough,” Pidge says. 

Allura hums. “And Yellow? How is—?”

“The Lions have found a seam in the casing, if they can get enough claws inside it I think a panel will pop off and they’ll be able to get in,” Hunk supplies.

Pidge nods along. She was skeptical at first but now—they WILL get through. They WILL get the pods, and they WILL bring them in time, and—

—And it’s at that exact moment that an alarm starts to go off, reverberating through the hollow spaces and the vines surrounding them.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> A little shorter than the others but that's just how it shook out, babey.


	7. Proximal

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Pidge finally gets to Keith.

There are cycles when Pidge wakes with the intercom system screaming in her ears. It’s not pleasant, but it happens. Sometimes she’s in the command center, having fallen asleep at her console yet again. Sometimes she’s buried up to her chin in blankets on the floor of her room. Sometimes she’s in her lion’s hanger. It’s a rude awakening, no exceptions. 

Other times, the alarms go off while she’s in the shower. Has food in her mouth. Is waist-deep in the outside paneling of the ship. Just… generally inconvenienced, you know?

What makes those alarms different from the one sounding right here, right now, is that she always knows what to do. She knows to throw off the covers, swallow that last bite of goo, slap that panel back on the chassis, suit up, and get to her Lion. Maybe she’ll be groggy, maybe she’ll be slow, but she’ll be on the move, ready and willing to kick some Galra ass.

Right now… in the mess of the Castle, with two or more Paladins incapacitated and at least one Lion fully out of commission… right now she does not know what to do. She’s frozen, gut clenched and head buzzing, unable to process the reality of their situation. 

They are already in crisis mode. 

This is already a catastrophe. 

What more, what else, could _possibly_ be going wrong?

“Where is that _coming from_?” Lance demands, apparently of the same mind. His voice shakes Pidge out of her momentary stupor, and she slows up to a pace that can barely be called a walk, pulling up the Castleship’s system log again. Sensors, sensors… which of the Castle’s six million sensors triggered the alarm system? Was it one of the internal breach sensors? Did the Lions trigger an atmospheric alarm? Was it a proximity sensor? It certainly sounds like a proximity sensor, but where is it coming from? Has it misconstrued the Lions as an enemy threat? _What is going on_?

The information rolls across Pidge’s holoscreen, and the more she sees the less certain she is. There are too many dead spots—too many holes in the database. Too much of the system is still offline—if she had enough of the wreckage sorted out _maybe_ she could triangulate the source of the ping, but without the time to do that she’s just… blind.

“It might just be the Lions?” she starts, uncertain, but just then ANOTHER system trips, and this one is clearly from the base of the ship, away from anywhere the Lions have been. “Quiznak,” she says. “I’m willing to bet it’s a proximity sensor.”

“We are in no state to fight!” Allura says over the comms, frustrated and exhausted.

“Local fauna?” Hunk offers, but he sounds much too quiet, much too tired. 

Pidge growls. She’s looking but she can’t—there’s nothing to find! There is nothing, nothing, _nothing_ —“Ugh! I don’t have enough cameras. We need a Lion to investigate!”

“They’re almost there!” Hunk says, concentrating. Beads of sweat dot his face. “Come on, girl. You can do this. You were born to do this. _This is your element_.”

The percussive bangs of Lion claws against the hull of the ship slowly morph into a high, oddly metallic screeching that makes Pidge wince. It’s like a rusty nail being pulled out of a wall. For one long moment, everyone is frozen—Pidge at the computer, cycling through video channels she’s already been through a dozen times; Hunk, holding Shiro tight to his side, his eyes closed; Allura, curled over Keith, her head on his chest; Lance and Coran, locked onto the piston, trying to get that final inch of give that they need; Slav, a silent witness; the Lions, each at their task, straining in every way that they know how…

…And then, everything gives, coming free all at once, like a tsunami making landfall. The plating on the outside of the castle tumbles off, sending vibrations through the entire shell; Hunk lets out his breath, his shoulders drooping; Coran lets out one last scream of exertion, Lance silent at his side _and_ —in their hands the piston comes free, sliding up and out of Keith’s abdomen.

With that, everyone dives into action, both teams moving on to the next task of their objectives. In the span of an instant the piston is cast aside, Allura sticks her hands directly into the hole nearly the size of a fist that was punched through Keith’s pelvis, Yellow scrambles just far enough inside the bruised and battered Castle to bat aside some debris and pick up half of the pod room _in its entirety_ with her massive jaws before she squirms around and launches back out the hole past Blue, who rears back to give her room and then takes off toward the sound of the alarm…

…as far away, down the hallways of winding vines and loose debris, Pidge scoops up her computer, scoops up her resolve, scoops up herself, and _takes off running_. The race is on now. Either she and Yellow will both arrive in time… Keith will die… or whatever triggered the alarm will obliterate them all.

Which, again, is a familiar feeling. It’s becoming quite normal, really—there are cycles when Pidge goes into battle and finds that the fate of the universe hinges on something in her control. Worse are the cycles when the fate of the universe hinges on something OUT of her control. There is always some kind of threat on the horizon, always some situation that they have to think their way through, _always someone_ _’s life on the line_.

Why is there _always_ someone’s life on the line?

Pidge doesn’t know. What she does know is that the vines make it easy to navigate—she just finds the largest one, the trunk of the thing, and keeps following that. On her heels, as close as they can get, Shiro and Hunk follow along. They’re pretty far back, now—she thinks she hears Hunk’s jet pack fire up but the thought is out of her mind as soon as it enters. She’s focused. Her mind has narrowed down to nothing but her own feet and the woody vine underneath them. Feels nothing but the pounding of blood in her ears. Sees nothing but the path ahead. 

She runs.

And waits, listening, until—

“She’s here!” Coran yells, somewhere in the distance. There’s the sound of Yellow setting down through Team Gramps’ comms. The hangar doors close behind the bulk of the lion. They can’t close the hole in the side of the castle, but enough of the ventilation is working that Coran can safely leap out of the bounds of the barrier, which he announces as he does just so.

“Coran, status on the pods!” Pidge calls.

“She’s lowering them… they’re almost down… and…OKAY, LET’S GET STARTED!” 

Pidge huffs, her head pounding as she keeps going, listening all the while to the sounds of him scrambling around. Endurance training has gotten her this far, but even years of conditioning hasn’t been able to turn a nerdy little nothing into a marathon racer. _Just have to keep going_ , she thinks to herself, over the sound of Lance settling next to Allura, murmuring softly to his Lion. Her body pleads with her to stop but she can’t because Keith is sobbing now, his screams turning to cries, and the alarms are still winding through the air, and there is no end, not here and not now. 

Coran’s mumbling gives her something to focus on, at least. “…plumbing’s mostly ripped up,” he’s saying now. “There’s a lot of shattered hydilixia here, I don’t think most of these will ever be up and running again, let alone soon… aha! Here’s one, this might be viable! I’m going in, I’ve got to expose the external power cables…”

He trails off, muttering too low for the mic to catch. Pidge growls, changing tact. “Lance, status on blue!” she says.

His voice comes with a tinge of uncertainty. “I can’t see anything… I honestly think it might be a false alarm? She’ll keep looking, but I think I can focus here. It’s just a lot of fucking plants.”

Okay. Okay. That’s okay. That’s fine. Now: “…Status on Keith?” she dares ask.

“Breathing still—” Allura gasps. A sound like static seems to spark around her voice as she speaks. “—it’s hard to—he hasn’t much time left—”

Less okay. Getting less okay by the moment. Pidge growls. How much farther does she have to go? She grunts, pushing harder, faster. Not fast enough. With a yell that even she can’t decipher she yanks out her bayard, shoots the grappling hook off into the distance, and gives it a small, experimental tug—there’s no give, it’s hooked in a solid place—before she leaps in the air and lets her momentum carry her forward, the glowing green line pulling her along like a winch. 

It’s faster, but only just. She reaches the grapple and unhooks it, ready to shoot it off again. It’s then that she hears it—definitely a jet pack, and coming in hot on her six.

She glances back just in time to see Hunk swooping in. Shiro’s arm is outstretched toward her and she reaches out with both hands to grab it as they shoot past. He just barely manages to hold onto her, the speed nearly pulling her arm out of it’s socket, but she’s on and holding tight to Slav who clutches at her with all his arms and she whoops out loud because they’re finally _moving_ , finally _getting somewhere_. Vines loom in the darkness, barely moving now that Green is starting to feel her exhaustion, but it doesn’t matter as Hunk keeps the jet pack’s thrusters up as high as they’ll go, speeding right on past until—

There. In the distance. A bright red starting to glow, the light at the end of the tunnel. It grows and grows until Hunk has the sense to cut the thrusters.

They’re still going fast enough that the four of them tumble against Red’s barrier in a very much less-than-graceful landing. Lance looks up and cheers from the other side of the glowing red particle shield, a shield which is covered in dust. Without pause, Pidge shoots her bayard into the ceiling and swings around to where Coran is half-submerged in a landslide of tech.

“Tell me what to do!” she orders, fingers itching and tingling with what may be exhaustion or may be adrenaline or may be all of it at once.

Coran starts, freeing himself from the deluge. “Thank a celestial moon sprite! I need those tiny fingers to finish dissecting these leads and prepare them for connection!”

That’s something she can delve right into. With her pulse beat-beat-beating in her head—again, still, she doesn’t know the difference—she tunes out _everything_. Her world becomes nothing but the teeny wires in front of her. Looking at their colors, their sizes—stripping off insulation with her bayard—determining which ends go to which ports, which they need and which can be peeled away—it _is_ everything. Everything she needs, everything she cares for—except, of course, for the ear trained on Keith’s cries, so _close_ now.

“We’re gonna save you,” she says aloud, and she knows she means it for Keith but also for herself, for all of them, for the entire universe. She means it with everything inside of her.

“Okay, Number Five—give that here,” Coran says, and Pidge passes over the sleeve of cables. Coran and Hunk have pried apart the base of the crumbling pod room wall, which was surprisingly intact even after the crash and its subsequent transport via Lion. “Now in you go—in in in!”

Pidge does not think twice—she goes into the tiny crawlspace they’ve made. She sees by the light of her bayard, lapping up and integrating every cord that they hand to her, no problem.

Just once, she glances up. Lance and Allura are there, half-dragging half-carrying Keith as close as they possibly can to the pod they’re working with. They are just on the other side of Red’s shield, as close as they dare get to the possible contaminants on this side of the barrier.

She only gets the smallest glance at Keith but that’s all she needs to refocus, to keep going. Keith… Keith is bloodless, except where it’s caked on him. He’s so limp that he’d look dead if it weren’t for the way his lips are drawn in pain. Allura’s hand is still inside him, her lips quivering with strain. Pidge sees that in infinite detail, in that one split second. How hard Allura is trying to keep Keith alive. How close he is to death despite this. How little time they have.

And then she wipes it from her mind, all but slamming the last lead into it’s proper place. Connections connected, she wriggles herself out of the little hole just as the pod screen goes up so she can then launch herself at the coding. One by one she brings up each error code, Coran and Hunk standing behind her, urging her on. Error, error, error… god, how many are there?

She’s ready to punt the entire thing into the stratosphere when suddenly the error end and a settings screen pops up. 

“Good job,” Coran says distractedly, already fiddling with the settings. “Okay, this is it guys! We don’t have a suit for him so we’ll just have to wing it a little! We’ve got one shot at this! Ready… set… go!”

All at once the front of the pod shimmers out of existence. At the same time Red’s barrier goes all the way down, leaving Lance free to gently push Allura and her shaking hands free from Keith. He hefts his semi-conscious teammate into his arms and stumbles forward, met by three more pairs of hands—Hunk, Pidge, and Coran, each grabbing hold to keep him upright. Lance takes one of Keith’s arms and Pidge the other, and then he’s there, he’s _right there_ , at the very edge of the pod, his feet hitting the bottom lip, and Pidge isn’t tall enough to haul him up higher, this is it, this is the end, oh dear god they’ve come so _close_ —

—And then Hunk sweeps his knees up and over, and all at once he’s in. The cover comes up just like that.

 _Deep breath_. Pidge huffs, caught in the feeling that she’ll never catch her breath. The room freezes, everyone watching. The stakes are high, so very high—if the pod doesn’t work then they’ve done all this for _nothing_. That can’t be true. 

But they won’t know until it works. Really works.

A drop of sweat crawls down the side of Pidge’s face. She doesn’t know if she’s hearing the water drip again between the echoes of alarms or if she’s losing her mind. One second passes. Then two. A moment. An ice age. 

God, if it doesn’t work…

And then, all at once, the mechanisms light up and the air inside the pod ices over.

“He might make it,” Coran breathes, falling back a pace. Allura has fallen to the ground, where she’s huddled up, barely able to lift her head, but she catches Pidge’s eye and she smiles. Hunk heaves out a sob, and Lance lets out a breath of air in a _whoosh_ , falling to his knees. Somewhere to the side Shiro is crying tears of relief. 

He’ll be the next in the pod. Then Hunk or Allura, maybe, and then Lance and Pidge. It’ll be good. It’ll be fine.

…If not for the fact that the Castle chooses that moment to rattle. Lance’s face goes slack and then there’s a _CRASH_ just outside the airlock. It’s just the right size to be a Lion, flung bodily past them. 

Hunk whimpers and Allura moans and Shiro has crouched automatically in front of Keith, in front of the pod, as if he can shield Keith from further harm with his body alone. He’s got literally nothing on him that could possibly serve as a weapon, and Pidge has a wild moment where all she can think is _meatshield_ , but she’s not focused on it for long because they’ve got bigger problems. _Several_ of them.

Problem one: ENEMIES.

Problem two: THE CASTLE CONTINUES TO BE IN RUINS.

Problem three: THE LIGHTS

HAVE STARTED

TO FLICKER.

“OH MY GOD,” Pidge yells, banging on her helmet in frustration. “We were SO CLOSE. JUST LET US HAVE THE ONE SMALL VICTORY!”

“We need the Lions,” Allura gasps. “Are any of you…?”

“On it,” Hunk says, and he hauls Lance up by the waist. 

Lance, meanwhile, is trembling. “She says there’s a lot,” he says, terrified. “Like, a lot, a lot. Not Galra, but something. They’re strong.”

“Did they just come out of the flora?” Hunk asks, confused.

“I think they might BE the flora!”

“Well, we’ll have to do as Defenders,” Pidge says, but Coran grabs her before she can make a move toward Green to see if she could get her up and running.

“ _We_ ,” he clarifies, “need to stabilize the power to the pod. We CANNOT risk it losing power for more than a few ticks. Keith needs at least an hour in there if we want to be able to move him.”

There are cycles when Pidge thinks she won’t make it. Cycles when she’s so exhausted she’s shaking, cycles when she’d welcome death, cycles when the universe might as well go down, her along with it. She’s not proud of herself those cycles. She’s never proud of the whiny fifteen-year-old that she can never quite seem to outgrow. But Katie ‘Pidge’ Holt is a Paladin of Voltron—she has lived this war for nine years and she’ll live nine more before she’ll come even close to giving up.

Even as she listens to the sounds of fighting tearing through the soil outside. Even as she crawls back inside the wall, looking for deeper psuedo-electrical cables. Even as life gets disjointed, exhaustion all around her, three lions—Black, Green, Red—out and useless, more of her team down for the count than up and able-bodied.

Even if this turns out to be her last stand.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Apologies for the wait! I'm working on the next chapter as we speak. It might be a ways off yet, but I'll get there sooner or later! In the meantime--I LOVE comments and reply to all of them! Feel free to start a conversation about where you think the story is going!

**Author's Note:**

> Cheers!


End file.
